Tag: Thomas Friedman

Donald Trump: His Mother’s Son

1. I pride myself on being that guy on the left who can make meaning out of even the most mindless right-wing text. With The Art of the Deal, I fear I may have met my match. About halfway through the book—chapter upon stultifying chapter about the time he flipped a housing complex in Cincinnati, the time he bought the Commodore Hotel, the time he negotiated with Bonwit Teller, the convention center he wanted to build in the West 30s—it hits me: the book reads like the memoir J. Peterman intended to write, based entirely on stories he bought from Kramer. 2. Thomas Friedman and Trump ought to get on like a house on fire: I do my own surveys and draw my […]

How Long Do You Have to Practice Apartheid Before You Become an Apartheid State?

The Daily Beast reports on a speech John Kerry gave to the Trilateral Commission: The secretary of state said that if Israel doesn’t make peace soon, it could become ‘an apartheid state,’ like the old South Africa. Jewish leaders are fuming over the comparison. South African apartheid lasted from 1948 to 1994: 46 years in total. The Occupation has lasted 47. What Jeffrey Goldberg has called Israel’s “temporary” or “provisional” apartheid is now one year older than South Africa’s “permanent” apartheid. During the Iraq War, Thomas Friedman routinely predicted that “within the next six months,” we’d find out whether Iraq was going to be a democracy or a basket case. So recurrent were these predictions, long after the six months […]

Thomas Friedman: You Give Clichés a Bad Name

I’m stealing the title of this post from Jim Neureckas. It’s a good summary of the thesis of this excellent piece from Jim Livingston. Jim (Livingston) takes apart the prose of a Thomas Friedman column—I know, easy sport—but as he gets ready to do it, he says something interesting about clichés. Now I don’t mind the mental nullity of cliché as much as my colleagues, who seem eager, indeed desperate, to demonstrate the idiocy—no, the fallacy—of received wisdom as it takes shape in the vernacular forms of journalism, conversation, pop music, whatever.  In fact, I find comfort in this category of cliché, because its very existence suggests the subversive possibilities of transformation by repetition.  It’s the analogue of rhyme, the […]